Blaine

If they drained energy in addition to overheating, I might not use them. In any case, you're wrong about overheating. Railguns (or at least current railgun technology) heat up substantially due to the tremendous electrical, repulsive, and kinetic forces involved. Those forces do have an effect on portions of a railgun system other than just the projectile, especially the rails themselves. Passing electric current through almost any material will cause it to heat up, for example, which is how we got lightbulbs.

Another note about railguns: Because they are limited by overheating, you can take your time to aim carefully without "losing" any overall DPS, as long as they have heat while doing so. You'll have to wait anyway when they fully overheat.

I've got a station wreck bookmarked on my galaxy map that contains 8 million Xanion. I'm staying away until I can bring a small fleet of salvaging ships to strip it in under 20 minutes. It despawned because the wreck despawn timer has been lowered to 30 minutes to reduce lag in sectors where lots of ships have been destroyed, and this also affects pre-spawned wrecks you find while exploring, which is unfortunate but hopefully will be solved eventually. As for actual asteroids, the largest "rich asteroid" I can remember had about 175,000 Xanion or Trinium in it.

I've been playing spaceship games of all different kinds since I received Wing Commander as a Christmas gift in 1990. I had just turned 8 at the time. I especially love explore/trade/upgrade/fight spaceship games, which I discovered with Wing Commander: Privateer. I went on to play many others, including Frontier: Elite II, Escape Velocity: Nova (highly recommended), EGOSOFT's X series, EVE Online, Starsector, and most recently, Avorion. I'm sure many of you have played some or all of these. Avorion is very similar to the X series (and clearly draws inspiration from it) but with better camera implementation, better controls, better (although quite different in style) ship physics, a superior UI, much better hardware performance, and most strikingly a powerful custom ship builder, with a little dash of EVE Online spices thrown in. Avorion is quite probably the best and most enjoyable explore/upgrade/trade/fight spaceship game I've ever played. Most of the janky features of the X series are implemented much more smoothly in Avorion, and Avorion is still fairly early in public beta. The game's a bit rough around the edges currently, but extremely playable and full of sandbox stuff to do. Therefore I'd like to thank the development team for this amazing game. I'm not exactly an ebullient person, but I really felt I had to say something here. I've been playing for 90 hours so far, and it's still fun and exciting.

Yeah, I got nailed for carrying guns one time. They fined me something like 1.5m and I allowed them to take my cargo. Lesson learned. I personally think this should be disabled until it's fleshed out a bit more. There's no tooltip informing you the cargo is considered dangerous, no notices or communiques of any kind, and chances are you'll only discover it when the space police pull you over.

I fully understand why the development team probably wouldn't want massive dreadnaughts maneuvering at 2 rad/sec, but for me it's all about looks, not about trying to be cheesy. In the real world, thrusters would obey the laws of inertia; sure, you can get that dreadnaught going 2 rad/sec or more eventually (heck, 200 rad/sec), but it would take an identical amount of thrust applied in the opposite direction(s) for the same amount of time to arrest that motion, and if you accelerated or decelerated too quickly any point it would tear the ship apart and/or turn the people inside into pink paste. Avorion is a game of course, not an exacting physics simulation, and I'm sure a happy balance will be found at some point.

I've also noticed the absence of upgrade modules that increase maneuverability. However, I gather (not from direct evidence; just from little tidbits I've seen here and there) that the developers may already think we're able to build ships that are too maneuverable, especially larger ship designs. My 12.45 mll m3, 0.12 Mt superfreighter can turn and pitch .5 rad/sec, for example, and its thruster placement and size definitely isn't ideal.

It's great that "thin-sliced" thrusters will be going away (so presumably volume will now contribute to thruster power, in addition to surface area), but I hope that we won't need enormous, building-sized thrusters on the sides of our ships to achieve halfway-decent pitch and yaw even on smaller designs. I don't mind paying the COST of large and powerful thrusters in terms of credits, materials, mass added to ship, power use, mechanics, etc., but aesthetically, requiring massive black thruster boxes pasted on every design seriously hampers the range of what can be created. The need for large thrusters is already pretty crazy, and I have to compromise most of my designs to get them to fit. If it gets much worse I might try my hand at modding to halve the visual size of thrusters.

I would suggest making the wings about half as thin (which helps keep mass down as well, especially since I assume there are no systems in them) and separating them from the core of the ship a little, instead attaching them with girders or some other connective structure.

I agree. Players can always choose to engage or disengage, even without boost, and this affects the game's difficulty negatively. It's trivially easy to escape once you have shields and even a modest amount of credits and resources to build a decent little skiff. It becomes a matter not of whether you will win, but of how long it will take you to win based on the power of your weapons. I'm playing on Normal and I haven't lost my ship in combat once. To be fair, I've been playing space trading and combat simulation games for decades and am pretty good at them, and I didn't mess around with combat much until I had some Trinium, but nevertheless this area of the game does need improvement.

Oh, I see what you mean. Sometimes there are language barriers so I thought maybe that was the case here. Well, they looked like faithful reproductions to me! I'm familiar enough with Battlefleet Gothic ships to recognize them, but not intimately familiar.

Your ships are great. They're clean, they're a good balance between elegant and bulky/brutish, they follow a certain theme, and they have enough detailing and greebles to add interest without looking like the outer space equivalent of an 17-year-old's heavily modded Honda Civic (apologies to anyone with heavily modded Honda Civics).

Faithful recreation means "true/accurate with regard to the source material," meaning you did a great job. I'm not talking about religious faith. That being said, PURGE THE UNCLEAN.

Which director(ies) specifically? Appdata/roaming/avorion, steamapps/common/avorion, or both? I'm asking mainly because I'd like to keep an eye on my own disk usage. The upside here is that instead of wasting disk space on voiceovers and graphics, Avorion uses disk space for complex gameplay with a huge universe.

Railguns don't use energy, as far as I've seen; they overheat, and the ones with high firing rate overheat very quickly indeed (5.83 seconds of holding down LMB, in the case of my turrets). Railguns do a ton of alpha-strike damage (though certainly not the highest DPS in the game, due to overheating), are very accurate, are perhaps the longest-range weapon type (though some other types with above-average range can reach further than railguns with below-average range), and railguns don't use energy which is good if your ship design is tight on that. Railguns are ideal for hit-and-run tactics. You can keep your distance from the enemy, they deal all their damage quickly until they overheat (alpha strike), and then you can boost away while they cool down, reposition your ship, and let your shields regen. I'm a big fan of railguns.

I tend to agree, although it's important to recognize that the game is 6-12 months from release and some things are essentially placeholders: they're there, but they're implemented simply until the developers iterate them. It's very true that aliens currently show up, attack NPCs only unless you fire weaponry, exhibit no other complex behavior, and are just walking loot pinatas once you're sufficiently powerful. It could work something like this, keeping in mind that I don't actually know all of the game's backstory and secrets yet and haven't gotten into the core (nor do I want spoilers), so I don't know what they are or what their motivations might be: Iron-Titanium: Small alien scouts show up from time to time and avoid conflict, staying away from the central portions of the sector and observing for a short while, after which they leave. If they're attacked, they will attempt to flee. Titanium-Naonite: Scouts still appear, but also, alien patrols of 3-4 small ships appear from time to time. These patrol all around the edges of the sector, and will attack if anyone gets too close, but will also attempt to flee if outmatched. Naonite-Trinium: Scouts no longer appear. Patrols do still appear, but also, small groups of alien warships can appear. These are aggressive and will attack smaller, weaker ships in the sector (even if the player doesn't actually fire a weapon), but again, will attempt to flee if outmatched. Trinium-Xanion: Patrols no longer appear. Small warship groups still do appear, but also, large warship groups can appear. These will attack any size of ship and although they'll still flee if outmatched, they'll only do so nearly at the last minute. Core: Small warship groups no longer appear. Large warship groups still do appear, but also, large battle fleets appear. These fleets attack everything in sight, stations included, and will never flee, fighting to the death.

Are you kidding? These are beyond amazing, not only in the faithfulness of reproduction, but also in how you figured out workarounds to the fact that all of Avorion's blocks are rectangular and/or angular and produced curves, the aquila emblem, etc. Of course, circles on a screen are made of very small rectangular pixels, so it's not hard to figure out how, but fitting them all together properly is a real feat.

It's usually going to be faster and easier to collect the needed materials and bring them to the empty factory than it is to go looking for another factory that isn't empty. Materials are often much easier to come by than end products (well, penultimate products in the case of turret parts). The good news is that turret factories are rather unbalanced at the moment and churn out absurdly overpowered weapons alongside very efficient and powerful mining and salvaging lasers, so when you do complete your quest you'll be able to obliterate everything in sight.

I too did the electric space boogaloo looking for laser and railgun parts. I eventually found them all, and multiple sources of most. I only found one Conductor factory after exploring hundreds of systems though, and it had no resources, so I had to bring it resources, too. The trick is to take time out to blast pirates, blast wreckage, build a new ship, etc.

I've noticed the same thing with railguns. I recently made a bunch for myself at a factory; they claim their range is 7.08 km, but they pretty much always miss at 7 km, or even 6 km—even if I'm stationary, my target is stationary, and all of my targeting circles are green and centered on a large portion of the target's hull. It's like they just phase right through it. However, under 4-5 km or so, they pretty much always hit. Personally, I think it's a range bug. Can't be lag when neither you nor your target are moving much/at all. I also agree that factory-made turrets are far too powerful. I mean look at these things: That's 1288.8 DPS, each, at Trinium tier. I have eleven mounted currently, so that's 14176.8 DPS with 9% chance for shield pierce. They do overheat in 7 shots, though, so in just shy of 6 seconds of constant firing; they lose their heat after about 10 seconds. Even so, they can obliterate two full fleets of aliens from deep in Xanion territory in a very short period of time (I haven't gotten to the core yet). Factory-made turrets should be maybe 25% more powerful than the best found weapons, not 3-4x more powerful. Maybe it has to do with difficulty? I wonder if enemies use/drop much stronger turrets on the highest setting? No idea, just a wild hypothesis. I'm not sure whether enemies drop stuff they actually have equipped on their ships, either, or if it's just random.

Deleting all parts can be tedious, so I recommend keeping a cube ship (2 x 2 x 2 iron hull) just like the one that is your root block saved in the Saved Ships directory. If you want to abort all of your building and revert to the basic iron cube, simply open Saved Ships, click the cube, then click "Apply Plan."

Ah yes, greebles. I try to minimize my use of greebles, though there's nothing wrong with them. If used well, they make ships looks complex and interesting. Many moons ago, I used to spend days making ships in Galactic Civilizations II and was extremely good at it. It's been a while, though, and Avorion has an excellent and powerful ship editor, but it has some limitations too that I have to learn to work with: no free rotation of parts, parts must snap together (can use a temporary framework, but still it's a challenge), no naturally curved pieces, and not a lot of pre-made greebles.

Sure, I'll attach it to the OP. Note that is has no battery (energy container) because I don't see the need for one, but I believe there's still a little bit of room left for a very thin, long, wide one inside the hull near the top if you want one. It's tricky to get the camera in there, but if you focus on the big cargo container starting under the glass "bridge" you should be able to find it. Otherwise, it's stuffed totally full of cargo and systems. It can even be scaled down a few steps and still works great as a smaller freighter, although once it hits ~6k cargo, the crew requirements are pretty tight and you need trained-up specialists to fit. Any smaller and you might need to add more crew space.

Nice ships! Very menacing, heavy-looking, and militaristic. I like that you pronounced "antennae" correctly in your video. Here in 'Murica, everyone just calls them "antennas," except for biologists. ;D

Windows is probably appending .txt to the Lua file. Start Menu > "folder options" in Search Bar > View tab > uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types", then erase the .txt suffix so that the filename ends only in .lua This should fix it for you. It did for me.